Great Scot! It's Doc Brown's Phone!

Funny line in this Times article about the capabilities that will be coming on phones in a couple of years:

Open up the device, point it at the street and ask it to show you what the place looked like 200 years ago, and it offers a photo or video.

Wow! Photos of what places looked like 200 years ago! Truly technology is progressing faster than I thought: apparently phones will have access to time-machine capabilities only a few short years from now...(fn1)

fn1: Some fun history. The first photographic techniques date to the 1820's but took several hours of exposure. The first relatively workable techniques were developed by M. Daguerre in the late 1830's and early 1840's. They took several minutes of exposure. So we are still at least a few decades away from being able to look at photographs of what places looked like 200 years ago, barring the invention of time travel allowing us to photograph them before the invention of photography.

The earliest workable motion picture camera was famously invented by Thomas Edison in the 1890's so we're quite aways away from calling up 200 year old moving pictures, even ignoring the fact that video more specifically referes to electronic capturing of motion pictures, which wasn't invented until the late 1920's by the fantastically named Philo T. Farnsworth. Electronic television, it should be noted, was based on an idea Farnsworth had at the age of 14! And people think teens today spend too much time thinking about television...

Fun Fact

So Mayor Bloomberg won a third term by a surprisingly narrow margin. Prob. a good thing that he won over the other guy, prob. also a good thing that it was scarily close. Lets him know New Yorkers are upset about his term-limits shennanigans.

But here's something odd I noticed. Again and again in the coverage of his victory it was noted that this makes him "only the fourth three-term mayor in the last century". This makes it sound like quite an unusual thing, no? Only 4 in 100 years?

Here's the thing, though. The first was LaGuardia who took office in 1934. NYC mayor terms are 4 years a piece. So the other way of looking at this "only the fourth" statistic is that when he completes his third term, New Yorkers will have spend 48 (3 terms * 4 years per term = 12 years per mayor, 4 3-term mayors * 12 years per mayor = 48 years) of the past, well, 80 years if we take LaGuardia's entrance as the start but, oh, let's call it 100 years so as to not cherry pick LaGuardia's start date.

48/100 years under 3-term mayors doesn't sound nearly as rare as "only the fourth in a century" does it? Going by number of mayors, it would be 4 of the last 10 mayors, again not exactly a once-in-a-lifetime event.

A good example of the truth in the phrase "lies, damned lies & statistics".

Wasted Opportunity

One real shame about Obama's win last night is that it ruins the punch of this fun fact: on election day 2032 Barack Obama will be slightly younger than John McCain is today.

2032.

Busy...

Been a busy week. So light posting, sorry.

Here's a quick fun fact for today:
If When Barack Obama finishes serving out his first term as president it will be the longest period of time that he has ever held one job without seeking a higher office.

That is, unless he figures out some higher office to go for. Most people would hold that President of the United States is about as high as offices get but maybe we could come up with a new one for him. Supreme Leader of the Americas? President of the World? Savior of Mankind?

Tee-hee

I think I was at this same wedding... (fn1)
(fn1) Fun Fact about me that you might not know: I love advice columns. Love 'em. I only have two that I read regularly now but that has gone as high as five at various points when I find ones I like.

Nischt, nischt, nischt...

Did you know Amy Winehouse is Jewish? Neither did I. In celebration of that fun fact, here is a middle-aged man performing "Rehab" in Yiddish.

Mazel-tov.